The approvals queue

Approvals is where recipes submitted for review wait. Its subtitle is the job in one line: “Review submitted recipes and publish them to the line.”

A brand with nothing pending reads 0 PENDING and “Nothing waiting for review — Recipes submitted for approval will show up here.” That is the normal resting state, not a sign anything is wrong.

Who can decide

The queue is visible and actionable to Approvers and Brand admins. A Creator cannot open it at all — navigating there directly returns a permissions error, not just a hidden menu item.

Three things about the model are worth stating plainly, because teams usually assume the opposite:

• It is a shared pool, not an assignment. A submission is not routed to one named approver. Anyone with the role can pick it up, which is what stops a menu change waiting on one person’s day off.
• Separation of duties is enforced by role, not by authorship. A Creator cannot publish their own work — that is the boundary. But an Approver may publish their own, and Tavorly does not block it.
• An Approver does not have to use the queue at all. Approvers and Brand admins can publish directly from the editor. The queue is the path for work that came from a Creator.

If your brand needs “nobody publishes their own change, ever”, that is a policy you hold your team to — not a rule Tavorly will enforce for you. See Roles, and what each one can do.

What you are looking at

Each pending item is one card showing the recipe’s type, who submitted it, when, and the note they left — e.g. production · submitted by Claude Agent Aug 18, 2026, 3:15 PM · “Switched to the new lemon supplier…”.

The note is the reason the field exists. “Switched to the new lemon supplier” tells the next person what to check. “update” does not.

Three actions per card: Review changes, Approve & publish, Reject. A Select all checkbox lets you act on several at once.

Review changes opens the recipe at its submitted revision, marked IN REVIEW, and shows what is different from the published version. It also carries:

• a Revision history, each revision numbered with the note it was submitted under — so you can see how a recipe got to where it is, not just its latest state
• a Print button, for reviewing away from a screen

On a recipe’s first revision there is nothing to compare against, and it says so — “New recipe — no earlier published version to compare against.” — rather than diffing against emptiness.

⚠ Approving publishes immediately

The button says Approve & publish, and it means it. There is no separate publish step: approve and it is live, which means a cook can be reading it moments later.

Two consequences worth internalising:

• Check before you approve, not after. Publishing also queues translation and writes kitchen notifications, and a notification cannot be recalled. Correcting a mistake means publishing a further revision, not undoing this one.
• A recipe with no ingredients and no procedure can still be approved. The card warns, in red: “⚠ No ingredients or procedure – the line will see a blank recipe.” It warns rather than blocks because a legitimate Front-of-House-only item — a bottled drink, a delivered dessert — genuinely has no build. The same warning shows in the editor for the author. If you see it on something that should have a build, reject it rather than approving a blank card to the line.

Rejecting

Reject asks for a note first: “Add a note so the author knows what to change. This is sent back with the recipe.” Its own example shows the standard being asked for — “Cook temp is too low for chicken – bump it to spec.”

The confirm button is Reject & send back, and that is exactly what happens: the recipe returns to draft with your note attached. It is handed back to its author, not deleted, and nothing they wrote is lost. You will see “Recipe sent back for changes.”

Write the note as though the author cannot ask you a follow-up question, because often they cannot. A rejection with no reason is a round trip nobody learns from.

Where it shows up elsewhere

Your dashboard’s Awaiting review tile counts this queue and links to it, so the number is visible without going looking. See Your dashboard.